Campus Pranks

“There is something glorious about a college prank. A really good
prank brings not just laughter, but a visceral satisfaction and a kind of
awe that does not fade with time nor diminish with retelling.”

— Neil Steinberg

Campus pranks
have a special place in modern lore, and students — flush with youth,
intellectually understimulated and face-to-face with inflexible and inane
authority — are frequently fertile fields of
foolishness.

Not all of the stories you hear of campus hijinks are more than legends, but
enough of the creative and wittier ones can be verified that a bit of
sports-like rivalry pops up (say, between
CalTech
and
MIT)
over the extent and
cleverness
of their hacks.

In one legendary hack, a number of students from
CalTech hacked the
instruction cards for Washington State’s half-time flip-card display
at the
1961 Rose Bowl. On national television, on the
most-watched college football game of the year, the stands suddenly filled
with the name of a college that was playing an
entirely different game.

On November 20, 2004 at the 121st Yale-Harvard game, 20 Elis donned custom
made “Harvard Pep Squad” t-shirts, applied enemy-red war paint
on their faces, and set out to pull a prank on 1800 Harvard alumni. Like
clockwork, these brave Elis proceeded to exude more Harvard spirit than any
Cantab ever… tossing t-shirts to the lucky and unsuspecting few, and
passing out 1800 sheets of red & white construction paper in perfect
order to the cheering Harvard crowd. With 4:47 minutes left in the second
quarter of the game, each member of the crowd raised their sheet of paper
expecting to spell out “Go Harvard” as they were told by the
cheering “Harvard Pep Squad.” Instead, the truth was revealed
to a laughing crowd of Yale alumni and students who saw the Harvard crowd
spell out in clear red letters “WE SUCK.”

Neil Steinberg, whose book If At All Possible, Involve a Cow is
a prime source for historical and cross-campus information on American
college pranks, writes:

There is something glorious about a college prank. A really good
prank
brings not just laughter, but a visceral
satisfaction and a kind of awe that does not fade with time nor
diminish with retelling. In the narrow world of university life, so
routine, so programmed and often — like life in the real world
— too dull to tolerate, a prank shakes things up, breaks the tedium,
and gives hope for a life filled with hidden, delightful possibility.

A student at Springbank High School in Calgary, Alberta, slid some
hardcore porn
into the middle of a video that accompanies the mandatory morning replay
of Canada’s national anthem.

The Yippies played an
interesting prank on a meeting of college newspaper editors. At one point
during a deadlocked discussion of whether the editors should come out
against the United States government policy in Vietnam, according to
YippieJerry Rubin:

Suddenly the lights went out and across the wall flashed scenes of World
War II fighting, burning Vietnamese villages,
crying Vietnamese women and napalmed children, image after image. The room
echoed with hysterical screams, “Stop it! Stop it!” A voice
boomed over a bullhorn: “Attention. This is Sergeant Haggerty of the
Washington Police. These films were smuggled illegally into the country
from North Vietnam. We have confiscated them and arrested the people who
are responsible. Now clear this room!…” The editors fell over
themselves rushing for the door.

Check out our Hugh Troy page to learn
about a number of pranks perpetrated by that king of campus practical
jokers.

Hackers at Louisiana Tech University
programmed the campus clock tower to play “Dueling Banjos” on
the hour.

A sniggle.net reader writes in: “The Battle Axe who worked in the
Registrars office at my former University almost went out of her way to
not help students in need of guidance. She always acted too busy
to help in any way. She soon found out the true meaning of
‘swamped’” The reader and some of his fellow-students
made hundreds of official-looking notices and posted them throughout
campus. The notices read:

ATTENTION ALL STUDENTS
Your Academic Points Booklets (A.P.B.’s)MUST be filled out IN FULL by June 15, 1995Failure to do so WILL result in loss of all Spring Quarter credits!

The notice directed students to the Registrar’s Office, which was soon
swamped with students demanding an “A.P.B.”
The booklets, of course, never existed.

The class of ’96 at Christian Fellowship School in Lakewood, Colorado,
went the extra mile both in perpetrating their senior prank, and in
documenting it on the Web.

When I was in college, I was annoyed enough by the pompous and worthless
declarations of university regulations that could be found on every other
vertical surface that I decided to get in on the act. I put up a notice
in the computer lab that read:

THE USE OF THESE COMPUTERS FOR ANY PURPOSE WHATSOEVER IS A VIOLATION OF
UNIVERSITY POLICY.

The sign stayed put. It may still be there today.

Someone from Boiling Springs High School took some official school district
letterhead and composed a note for parents saying that the district would
be providing hotel rooms and condoms for the safety of students on prom
night. Nice one.

Students at the University of Waterloo
altered
a water tower in amusing fashion back in 1958 and they’re still talking
about it today.

Nonexistent people are sometimes
enrolled in class for the
amusement
of those in the know. Joseph David Oznot, Adelbert l’Homme-dieu X.
“Bert” Hormone, Joe Gish, Ephriam di Kahble, Cuthbert Gleep,
Warren G. Wonka, Helmar Sciete and Cyndi LePage are among the non-students
who have attended.

Which reminds me of
Hugo N. Frye,
the founder of the New York state Republican Party. Or not.

The 60s and
70s
are thought of as the heyday of creative campus protest, but when you
remember that in the 1930s students at Princeton
U. brought us the biting and very
successful parody-organization
Veterans of Future Wars,
you see that this sort of tomfoolery has been around for a
while…

Legendary newspaperman William Randolph Hearst, as a student at Harvard
University, sent as gifts to every member of the Harvard faculty a
chamberpot with the recipient’s picture affixed inside.

A correspondent writes: “At my old high school we managed
to get a 20 foot for-sale sign and drape it over the front, we got newspaper
coverage in the classifieds: ‘large house for sale, 103 bedrooms, lake
front access, 10 bathrooms and a full sized
gym’ (or something like that). Fun
prank, no damage (except for the sign we had to steal), we had the sign up
on Saturday night, was there all day Sunday and Monday, the students loved
it.”

Students at Norton High School in California, upset at mandatory urine
tests the school had insisted on as their part in the drug war hysteria,
held a bake sale every day to raise funds for their protest — selling
poppy-seed-infested desserts which happened to have the property of
inducing false-positives in the drug tests of those who ate them. Soon,
half the school was testing positive for opiates and the urine tests
were worthless.